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1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

claude.com

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Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#301
post #99
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source? I ask because I use 500k+ context on these on a daily basis. Big refactorings guided by automated tests eat context window for breakfast.

i find gemini gets real real bad when you get far into the context - gets into loops, forgets how to call tools, etc

yeah gemini is dumb when you tell it to do stuff - but the things it finds (and critically confirms, including doing tool calls while validating hypotheses) in reviews absolutely destroy both gpt and opus.

if you're a one-model shop you're losing out on quality of software you deliver, today. I predict we'll all have at least two harness+model subscriptions as a matter of course in 6-12 months since every model's jagged frontier is different at the margins, and the margins are very fractal.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#302
Could be pure coincidence, but my Claude Code session last night was an absolute nightmare. It kept forgetting things it had done earlier in the session and why it had done them, messed up a git merge so badly that it lost the CLAUDE.md file along with a lot of other stuff, and then started running commands on the host machine instead of inside the container because it no longer had a CLAUDE.md to tell it not to. Last night was the first time I've ever sworn at it.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#303
post #252

Finally, I don't have to constantly reload my Extra Usage balance when I already pay $200/mo for their most expensive plan. I can't believe they even did that. I couldn't use 1M context at all because I already pay $200/mo and it was going to ask me for even more. Next step should be to allow fast mode to draw from the $200/mo usage balance. Again, I pay $200/mo, I should at least be able to send a single message wit…

I find it hard to understand that people consider $200 p/m a lot for what they are getting. Expensive compared to what? A netflix sub? A 1hr of a senior dev is at least $100, depending where one lives. Since Claude saves me hours every day, it pays for itself almost instantly. I think the economic value of the Claude subscription is on the order of $20-40k a month for a pro.

When did I say anything about what I'm getting? I said I pay $200/mo and I expect that to cover anything up to my usage limit. I don't expect any slightly non-standard configuration to immediately ignore the high subscription price that I pay and go straight to "extra usage" that has to be billed separately by the token. I wouldn't even care if fast mode used 10x or 50x the usage as long as I could actually USE the balance that I already pay for. I thought the point of extra usage was to be for overage.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't transformer attention quadratic in complexity in terms of context size? In order to achieve 1M token context I think these models have to be employing a lot of shortcuts. I'm not an expert but maybe this explains context rot.

Nope, there’s no tricks unless there’s been major architectural shifts I missed. The rot doesn’t come from inference tricks to try to bring down quadratic complexity of the KV cache. Task performance problems are generally a training problem - the longer and larger the data set, the fewer examples you have to train on it. So how do you train the model to behave well - that’s where the tricks are. I believe most of it…

A quick Google search reveals terms such as "sparse attention" that are used to avoid quadratic runtime.

I don't know if Anthropic has revealed such details since AI research is getting more and more secretive, but the architectural tricks definitely exist.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#305

Could be pure coincidence, but my Claude Code session last night was an absolute nightmare. It kept forgetting things it had done earlier in the session and why it had done them, messed up a git merge so badly that it lost the CLAUDE.md file along with a lot of other stuff, and then started running commands on the host machine instead of inside the container because it no longer had a CLAUDE.md to tell it not to. Las…

I think this is just the nature of a nondeterministic system; occasionally you're gonna be unlucky enough to encounter the leftmost segment of the bell curve.

In my experience dumping a summary + starting a fresh session helps in these cases.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#306
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kinds of things are you building? This is not my experience at all. Just today I asked Claude using opus 4.6 to build out a test harness for a new dynamic database diff tool. Everything seemed to be fine but it built a test suite for an existing diff tool. It set everything up in the new directory, but it was actually testing code and logic from a preexisting directory despite the plan being correct before I tol…

You probably just don't have the hang of it yet. It's very good but it's not a mind reader and if you have something specific you want, it's best to just articulate that exactly as best you can ("I want a test harness for , which you can find "). You need to explain that you want tests that assert on observable outcomes and state, not internal structure, use real objects not mocks, property based testing for invarian…

With the back and forth refining I find it very useful to tell Claude to 'ask questions when uncertain' and/or to 'suggest a few options on how to solve this and let me choose / discuss'

This has made my planning / research phase so much better.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im convinced everyone saying this is building the simplest web apps, and doing magic tricks on themselves.

I've been building a new task manager in C for Linux. If you're not using AI you are cooked. You just don't realize it yet. https://i.imgur.com/YXLZvy3.png

> If you're not using AI you are cooked. You just don't realize it yet.

Truth. But not just “using”.

Because here’s where this ship has already landed: humans will not write code, humans will not review code.

I see mostly rage against this idea, but it is already here. Resistance is futile. There will be no “hand crafted software” shops. You have at most 3-4 years left if you think this is your job.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#308
post #153

Friends, just write the code. It’s not that hard.

Not hard, but time consuming. In the past two weeks I've had Claude Code write me around 35k lines of code across 350 commits. It's a project which is giving positive impact to the company, but we would never have started it without CC as the effort would have been too big compared to the impact.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#309
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd been on Codex for a while and with Codex 5.2 I: 1) No longer found the dumb zone 2) No longer feared compaction Switching to Opus for stupid political reasons, I still have not had the dumb zone - but I'm back to disliking compaction events and so the smaller context window it has, has really hurt. I hope they copy OpenAI's compaction magic soon, but I am also very excited to try the longer context window.

If you use OpenCode (open source Claude Code implementation), you can configure compaction yourself : https://opencode.ai/docs/en/config/#compaction

Not sure if it's a common knowledge but I've learned not that long ago that you can do "/compact your instructions here", if you just say what you are working on or what to keep explicitly it's much less painful.

In general LLMs for some reason are really bad at designing prompts for themselves. I tested it heavily on some data where there was a clear optimization function and ability to evaluate the results, and I easily beat opus every time with my chaotic full of typos prompts vs its methodological ones when it is writing instructions for itself or for other LLMs.

Re: 1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

#310
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd been on Codex for a while and with Codex 5.2 I: 1) No longer found the dumb zone 2) No longer feared compaction Switching to Opus for stupid political reasons, I still have not had the dumb zone - but I'm back to disliking compaction events and so the smaller context window it has, has really hurt. I hope they copy OpenAI's compaction magic soon, but I am also very excited to try the longer context window.

If you use OpenCode (open source Claude Code implementation), you can configure compaction yourself : https://opencode.ai/docs/en/config/#compaction

so you have to garbage collect manually for the AI?

also, i don't want to make a full parent post

1M tokens sounds real expensive if you're constantly at that threshold. There's codebases larger in LOC; i read somewhere that Carmack has "given to humanity" over 1 million lines of his code. Perhaps something to dwell on

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